Why your intranet should be automated

The modern intranet has stepped up

The modern intranet is at the core of your digital employee experience. No longer a simple home for policies and documents, today, the intranet is an integral part of any employee engagement strategy. As the digital front door to your organization, keeping your intranet at the forefront of innovation is mission critical.

Adding to the pressure, employee expectations are being shaped by the technology they use in their personal lives. They want curated experiences that surface the content they need, on the channels they prefer, at the times they’re most primed to engage. Delivering on this is no mean feat.

At the same time, internal communicators are stretched. With an ever-creeping scope of responsibilities, stagnant budgets, and more content than ever needing to be churned out at pace, something’s got to give.

But all is not lost. Intranet automation is stepping in to give comms teams the means to execute in tough circumstances. Here’s how.

#1. Keeping content fresh, without the manual labor

With so much content to manage, how can you ensure everything on your intranet is up-to-date? Outdated content erodes trust leading to confusion and ultimately disengagement. With an automated intranet, you can let the system do the governance work for you. Set rules that ensure content is reviewed by content creators within a pre-defined timeframe. Even the busiest team can be sure reminders give multiple prompts to the people who need them. For the most risk-averse teams, automation gives you the means to auto-unpublish content that passes the deadline for review. Keep knowledge fresh, people informed and governance intact.

#2. Early bird catches the worm

Internal communicators know there are certain times when employees are most primed to engage. But sitting around waiting to press publish at those times isn’t always possible and certainly isn’t efficient.

Automation allows you to take your foot off the pedal and trust in your platform to deliver communications at the best time for your people. Set the date and time your comms are going out in advance, tailor that to audiences based on location with targeting and segmentation, and let the system press go for you.

#3. Get the true measure of engagement

We know that article views don’t mean that an employee has digested the information you’re sharing. But with intelligent content goals, an automated intranet will know what true engagement looks like. Instead of tracking how many employees have viewed an article, it will deep dive into the type of content you want them to engage with and deliver metrics that actually have meaning. For example, opening a video isn’t engagement. Real engagement is an employee that watches that video the whole way through. An automated intranet knows this and will discount the happy-clickers that check the box without absorbing the content.

#4. Drive incremental gains

It may feel like you’ve hit an engagement ceiling. 40% viewership on a piece of content may feel like you’ve reached the peak. But automated intranets help you smash through to greater heights. Automate follow-up sequences to retarget the audiences you’re yet to engage, turning intranet lurkers into active participants. Aside from reducing the noise to colleagues that were with you from the start, automated retargeting allows you to adapt your approach with no legwork to reach the unreachable. Let’s say you’ve recently launched a survey. You’ve published an article and sent an email, but some users still haven’t taken action. Pre-set reminder emails that establish the urgency for employees that were just too busy the first time around. Utilize different channels to get their attention – send a Teams or Slack message to reach them where they are and remind them of what you need them to do.

#5. Build a buzz

Instead of landing your employees with adhoc messages and fragmented content, automated intranets let you stitch your content together into a logical flow. Start with awareness pieces that capture attention at the earliest opportunity and leverage that awareness to create an appetite for what’s coming next. Bring structure to your campaigns to guide your employees from where they are to where you want them to be. From the pre-launch comms to the go-live announcement all way through to collecting feedback, deliver employees a guided communications experience that turns fragmented content into a cohesive message. Utilize automated campaign workflows to make it happen.

Take yourself out of the nitty gritty and into the big picture

With intranet automation, the size of your team no longer matters. Technology does the legwork while you focus on the big picture. Repurpose time previously spent manually orchestrating complex campaigns on truly understanding your people and elevating their experience through impactful comms.

Automated intranets finally allow internal communicators to embrace their new strategic role: understanding their people and advising their leaders on how to create experiences that transform engagement. Whether that be designing more holistic employee journeys, creating closer bonds with your people-minded counterparts, or using smart data and insights to compel your executives and tell better stories – automation is here to help you make a bigger mark.

Final question: with all this free time, what will you do next?

Discover the power of an automated intranet